Random thoughts on Big Brother, advertising and the Internet

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yesterday as I was recounting the feud on alt.politics.socialism.trotsky
which led to my being victimized at work, a friend politely but firmly
insisted I needed a psychotherapist. Leaving aside the question of why I
would want to throw 100 dollars down the toilet each week, I tried to
explain to her why I waste my time there.

It is this simple. I am not wasting time--I am killing time. I am a
maintenance programmer which means that unless there is a problem with the
production system I am assigned to, I really have nothing to do from 9 to 5
each day. If I worked as a fireman, nobody would raise an eyebrow if I
played checkers all day, but in the corporate world (including an Ivy
League corporation) you have to keep up the appearance of being 'productive'.

Before the Internet became a fact of life for computer programmers, there
were numerous ploys to give the impression that you were being
'productive.' The more insecure souls would study manuals. If you've ever
looked at an old IBM mainframe manual dealing with Cobol error codes, you
would realize at once how insecure these people might have been.

Other ploys consisted of going into a workmate's cubicle and bullshitting
in hushed tones for hours on end. The boss would have no way of knowing
whether you were talking about the NY Knicks or how to figure out a data
exception (OC7). Or you would talk on the phone all day. Nobody could
really tell if you were talking to a bookie or to a computer operator. Of
course, with the Internet all that is beginning to change.

===
Mystery Porn Surfer Becomes Phantom Menace (www.computerworld.com)

Determining that an employee has been surfing porn sites is one thing;
proving it is another

BY JUDE THADDEUS  (August 28, 2000) It's been a busy week. I'm trying to
keep track of the number of extremely senior people that I'm annoying, but
it's not easy - and it's only going to get harder next week.

The trouble all stems from my innocent discovery last week that someone was
surfing inappropriate (read: pornographic) Web sites from the workstation
of an extremely senior member of the company. I promptly passed my findings
over to human resources. A staffer approached the problem with guns blazing
and then had to backpedal quickly when I reminded her that the data I'd
passed her wasn't totally reliable.

The reasons behind that are complex. At the moment, users don't have to
authenticate themselves to our Web proxy server. This means that our Web
proxy has no idea who requests a particular Web page but only records the
IP address from which the request came.

So I take the IP address, resolve that to a machine name using our domain
name server (DNS) and then find out who's using that machine from our
inventory system. It's not an elegant solution, but it leaves me about 95%
certain of the identity of the surfer. That, as far as I'm concerned, is
enough proof to warrant a quiet request to management to deal with the user.
 ===

Of course the bitter irony here is that because computers were introduced
into the workplace in order to rationalize production in the first place,
employees have been driven to seek some kind of diversion during the
workday. With the introduction of the Internet, the computer has taken on
an added dimension. No longer just a tool for composing memos or
spreadsheets, it now has become an entertainment medium. The decision, of
course, to make the computer into a television set was that of corporate
America itself, the same powers that are creating jobs that are more and
more robot-like.

The newspapers are filled with stories nowadays of employees being fired
everywhere for inappropriate use of computer resources. Surely if I had
been fired, it would have been the first occurrence of someone being
victimized for exposing Ralph Nader rather than a woman's breasts. Some
Marxist commentators view this kind of workplace "slowdown" as a
semiconscious anticapitalist gesture. I have not made up my mind on this
question, but I would refer people to the long (31 pages) and very
interesting piece by Curtis Price titled "Fragile Prosperity? Fragile
Social Peace" at the Collective Action website.

(www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2379/index.html)

Price basically argues that 'wasting time' on the job has a political
element attached to it:

===
Sometimes on the left it is acknowledged that these types of actions exist
but then the objection is made that these actions are primarily
"apolitical" or even worse, useful and even necessary to the smooth
operation of the system because such actions let workers harmlessly blow
off steam while leaving the "big picture", the underlying structures of
exploitation intact. After correctly noting that U.S. workers may be more
difficult to manage, this is an error Doug Henwood made in Left Business
Observer a couple of years ago when he concluded such activities as
essentially "conservative" despite their surface "naughtyness."

This defines the question too narrowly. Informal resistance can't be so
neatly compartmentalized on one side and 'proper' resistance on the other;
with one form of struggle "accommodating" and the other not. In most cases,
the two forms of struggle complement one another. Since informal resistance
is a result of the day-to-day antagonisms and tensions that exist in every
work place, informal resistance accordingly acts as a foundation for, and
not a distraction from, open challenges to discipline and the work process.
Underneath the small, even personal rejections, is a implicit recognition
of a persistent underlying "us" versus "them" conflict of interests
expressed throughout almost every aspect of bureaucratized, class society;
from this society's unemployment offices and welfare lines through its
workplaces, schools, prisons and street corners. Taken in isolation, these
rejections are without a doubt insignificant, in the same way that it can
be likewise said an individual atom has no significance on its own. Yet,
just as individual atoms put together produce something qualitatively
different than merely the sum of the individual parts, so it is that the
small actions in class conflict are a leaven for the large.
===

I recommend Price's article. Although I generally shy away from "Council
Communism" of the sort that informs the Collective Action website, finding
it just another variety of anarchism, I must admit that there is very good
stuff here all in all.

As the differences between the Internet and the commercial world becomes
narrower and narrower, one of the principal parties we will have to blame
are the Ivy League universities who have sought to enrich themselves
through the pursuit of cyber-Mammon. At the head of the pack is my own
employer, Columbia University as this NY Times article reports:

===
The New York Times, August 2, 2000, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final

Columbia Sets Pace In Profiting Off Research

By KAREN W. ARENSON

When Fredric D. Price, the president of a nutritional-supplements company,
sought a partner to create an online information company, NutritionU.com,
he approached a Columbia University professor, Dr. Richard J. Deckelbaum.

He hit pay dirt.

Some academics might have run the other way, concerned about the motives
and standards in the emerging commercial market for cybereducation. But Dr.
Deckelbaum, director of Columbia's Institute of Human Nutrition, viewed the
Internet as a way to reach a wider population.

Columbia was interested, too. The venture fit its strategy of turning more
of its intellectual capital -- its professors' knowledge, research and
teaching -- into financial capital. It quickly forged an agreement with Mr.
Price for fees and a share of the company.

Columbia's eagerness to join forces with a start-up Internet venture
reflects a shift in an academic culture that once saw itself driven only by
intellectual curiosity and far removed from commerce. While the change is
occurring throughout the academic world, few universities have tried to
cash in as aggressively as Columbia, which has a research capacity similar
to that of Harvard and Yale but without their endowments.

As Columbia ventures further and faster than its peers -- it is collecting
more in patents and royalties than any other university -- it is the focus
of concern and envy. . .

Dimitris Anastassiou, a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia,
said he worried about the perception among some faculty members that the
university increasingly "appears to be a for-profit enterprise." He would
like it to put more of a wall between decisions about how the campus can
make money, and decisions about what research the university should
support. Currently, both sets of decisions are vested in the executive vice
provost, Michael M. Crow, who receives the university's income from patents
and royalties and decides how to spend it. . .

Columbia's provost, Jonathan R. Cole, acknowledges that there is a
revolution taking place in what he calls the "means and modes" of producing
knowledge, but argues that it will be possible to safeguard the underlying
values of the university.

"I think the dominant values are predominantly the same as they used to
be," he said. "The income is only a means to continue to pursue our mission."

"Our motivation is to be entrepreneurial," Mr. Cole said. "We've been
giving it away for generations. Now we want to get a fair return, always so
we can reinvest it." (clip)

Columbia has been well ahead of the pack. The partnership with
NutritionU.com is just one of the deals it has announced in recent months.
In April, it announced the creation of Fathom.com, a commercial online
partnership with other prestigious institutions, including the New York
Public Library, the British Library and the Smithsonian Institution's
National Museum of Natural History; those institutions and others will
offer information and classes on the Web site. In May, the university
announced that it was teaming up with Cognitive Arts, a software designer,
to offer continuing education on the World Wide Web.

Columbia was the first university to join forces with UNext.com, a start-up
backed by Michael Milken, the former junk-bond king, that is offering
Internet college courses created by elite universities. Columbia has
already collected $2 million.

Dr. Crow, Columbia's executive vice provost, has been directing the
university's efforts to cash in on its intellectual property. He has easy
access to the provost and the president. And he has a hefty bankroll: more
than $40 million this year, money not subject to the normal budget process
or any faculty oversight.
===

The other side of this commercial onslaught has been the introduction of
advertising into almost every nook and cranny of what Jurgen Habermas calls
the "public sphere." It is literally impossible to listen to a classical or
'non-profit' radio station today for more than 20 minutes without being
assaulted by ads for concert performances, luxury automobiles or dot.coms.
The station-switching buttons on my stereo receiver remote control have
practically worn off from heavy use.

Every single square inch of real estate in NYC is covered with ads. You can
now see special monitors in public spaces where you have to stand on line.
They do nothing but hawk merchandise. If you go to see a current Hollywood
blockbuster in the local Cineplex, you will discover that the first short
is a long commercial for something like Coca-Cola or Nike. It is more
ambitious and more 'entertaining' but it is a fucking commercial when you
get right down to it. The latest innovation from the hucksters are
commercial wrappings for private automobiles (every bus and subway has
already been covered) as today's NY Times reports:

===
NY Times, Sept. 1, 2000

And Now, a Few Words From Your Car's Sponsor

SUPPOSE a rich uncle gave you a new car, or regularly sent checks to help
with the monthly payments? Two California companies are playing Daddy
Warbucks, but their generosity has strings attached: The cars serve as
eye-catching mobile billboards for corporate sponsors.

For example, Susan Jarboe, an account executive with an employment agency,
parades around San Francisco in a Volkswagen New Beetle with
silver-and-purple bull's-eyes on each side -- a come-on for an Internet
portal called MobileEngines.com.

"I get a lot of stares," she said. "I get stopped at least 20 or 25 times a
week." Passersby want to know about the ad that covers nearly every square
inch of her car.

For being an auto-exhibitionist, Ms. Jarboe gets $350 a month from FreeCar
Media of Los Angeles. "It seemed like a great way to make my car payment,"
she said.

FreeCar Media, which started operating in March, and Autowraps, a San
Francisco company that is two months older, are leading a charge to wrap
private cars with advertising, a trend that is sweeping the West Coast and
starting to move east. FreeCar gives selected motorists two years' use of a
new car. The owner is responsible for insurance, maintenance, fuel and
stares. Autowraps pays participants $100 to $400 a month if they agree to
have advertising slathered on cars they already own.
===

It is no accident by the way that most of the advertising in public spheres
is for one dot.com or another. We have entered the period of late
capitalism in which the sale of services on the Internet has become one of
the most dynamic. This of course defers the question about their long term
viability, as the recent meltdown of dot.com equities would indicate. In
any case, it is absolutely necessary to saturate every inch of public space
for advertisements for dot.coms because this is generally the only way a
consumer can learn about them. Unlike "brick and mortar" type
establishments, where you can talk to a salesperson, electronic commerce
relies on a chance occurrence on the Internet. Since most people are turned
off by advertising as it is, the only recourse for the capitalist investor
is to increase the quantity of such crap.

This is what our life has become in these best of times. Big brother in the
workplace, commercials everywhere you look and war in the hinterlands.


Louis Proyect
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